++ to various posters in this thread who have put in a good deal of work identifying the problem.

I wholeheartedly second syphillis's call for someone to comment from an Indian/Asian cultural perspective - there is no full consensus in western culture on what constitutes plagiarism and/or copyright theft, look at the current debates on music/film downloading & fair use for an example - so there could be cultural differences that we are overlooking.

Taking the assumption that this is nothing more than cynical plagiarism for the purpose of gaining XP, perhaps the gods and/or pmdev could implement a mechanism for changing the nodetype of a node to a non rep-bearing nodetype, preventing anyone from voting on it, and perhaps also locking the node from OP edits.

Once plagiarism was proven removing the nodes accumulated rep from the posters XP would render the exercise pointless, with a slight disincentive since not every node ++ results in XP++

This approach would also allow the temporary suspension of voting on a node if it was under suspicion but not necessarily proven to be plagiarised.

Of course, that assumes that the problem is serious enough to warrant making changes to the site. Otherwise unapproval and -- should be enough to cover it. After all, few site regulars can be unaware of the suspicions that have surrounded madtoperl for quite some time.

--------------------------------------------------------------

"If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing."
John Brunner, "The Shockwave Rider".